Saturday, January 24, 2009

Pretence

Outside the winter sun spills fragments of captured want in a glittering stream of golden illusion which strikes the glaring arctic reality of ice and shatters in the crystal green of my eyes. I flinch from the vacant promise of its beckoning need and feel the frost of my soul intensify its grip on the reality of a life in abeyance.

It seems I blinked, a fluttering of lashes, a flash of lid and in that momentary suspension of colour and light, my life went spinning into a second of darkness that lasted an eternity. I open my eyes, unaware of the capriciousness of time and moment and find myself in this world of dissonance and harsh reality, adrift in choices made and seconds lived and barely recalled as if somehow, it were another who walked in my shoes and made those decisive moments which have shaped a future I never envisioned.

My eyes leak regrets, dripping emerald sighs down the arroyos of past transgressions, useless, wasted thoughts, better to be expunged and denied and packed away in boxes to be tucked away into the corner of a soul grown ancient and withered in my chest.

But I reach out and pull the fruit of my choices to me and lick resignation into their needy want, and wish passionately that like you, I knew how to quieten the demons of hope and desire into tortured subjection to fear. I yearn for the certainty of acquiescence to dreams not lived and hope denied.

The cold golden glow of an arctic sun, teases as it dances a minuet over the hard-packed snow, an empty promise of surcease, spitting burning splinters of contempt into my empty gaze. My body stands suspended, alabaster skin crystallizing pale flowering prisms of defeat along its pale surface, as slowly but surely Despair claims triumphant victory over what after all is an illusion of warmth and the death of belief and hope.

Resignation truly is the culprit here, purveyor of pretence and promises never to be kept, sycophant of Anguish, toady to Desolation.

And yet I blink and in that moment of suspended time, sighing, painfully, pull around my shoulders the illusion of your promise and as the soul-eating cold seeps into the tattered remnants of heart, pretend like you.